“Violence composes a fundament of modern Taiwan history,” opens Ian Rowen’s introduction to Transitions in Taiwan: Stories of the White Terror. In the almost forty years during which Taiwan’s authoritarian ruling party, the Kuomintang (KMT), kept the country under martial law and suppressed any form of political dissent, thousands of citizens—including alleged proponents of Taiwan’s…
Choi Eunyong’s best-selling Shoko’s Smile has earned her comparisons to novelists such as Sally Rooney and Marilynne Robinson for the collection’s carefully crafted portraits of women’s relationships and intimacies formed and dissolved over time.
Prepare to be annoyed, Mona Dash warns the reader on the first page of her debut collection of stories. Those expecting to find tales of saris and jasmine will be disappointed, she says. Instead, the reader should prepare for stories which have not been told before: the voices traditionally marginalized by those belonging to the…
When grieving is over, when no one pauses to remember, things will be forgotten forever.
In many ways, Taiwan presents a compelling example of how autocratic regimes impose their will on a population, often as colonial overlords. A peaceful island peopled by Austronesians and ethnic Chinese, rich in agricultural output, has been a geopolitical pawn in recent history, first by the Japanese and then the defeated regime of Chiang Kai-shek…
In his debut short story collection, Jonan Pilet explores the lives of Mongols and expats, looking for a sense of home within the nomadic culture. Based on the author’s insights having grown up in Mongolia, the series of interlinked narratives capture the cultural turmoil Mongolia experienced after the fall of the Soviet Union, painting a…
Taiwan’s contemporary commitment to transitional justice and democracy hinges on this history of violence, for which this volume provides a literary treatment as essential as it is varied. This is among the first collections of stories to comprehensively address the social, political, and economic aspects of the White Terror and to do so with deep…
Since the lifting of martial law in 1987, queer authors have redefined Taiwan’s cultural scene, and throughout the 1990s many of their works have won the most prestigious literary awards and accolades. This anthology provides a deeper understanding of queer literary history in Taiwan. It includes a selection of short stories, previously untranslated, written by…
The stories collected in Terminal Boredom take up themes that might feel familiar to readers of contemporary Japanese fiction. The characters criticize, challenge, or defy social conventions. Narrators raise questions about identity and agency. But unlike, say, Mieko Kawakami or Sayaka Murata, author Izumi Suzuki died more than three decades ago.
A new anthology from Canada’s renowned Ricepaper Magazine, this third collection in the Ricepaper Magazine series includes short stories, poetry, and nonfiction by writers of Asian descent from across the world. The theme which binds the collection is “belief”, a notion personal to each individual sharing a piece of themselves in their works.
An old farmer, trying to build a plane in his village. A young man that gambles everything on the roaring stock market. A community transformed by a magical fruit that evokes vivid memories. A Chinese woman unable to understand her American partner. People stuck in a train station, waiting for a train that never comes.
A desire to love, befriend, and uncover characterize Purple Perilla, a short collection of three stories from acclaimed Chinese author Can Xue. The book offers a poetic reckoning for our present moment, while the COVID-19 crisis continues to shape our lives.
The stories in Land of Big Numbers, Te-Ping Chen’s debut collection, are—to get the headline out of the way—fine, well-crafted works. Some have appeared in such publications as The Atlantic, Granta and The New Yorker and it’s easy to understand why: the prose is limpid, the observations acute, the situations original, the pacing near perfect….
It’s been just about a year since international travel all but came to a standstill, so it could either feel timely or insidious to be presented with a new book of short stories set across East Asia, the Pacific, and Europe, several of which feature travelers. Simon Rowe’s latest collection, Pearl City: Stories from Japan…
People from My Neighborhood is a book about relationships. Kawakami Hiromi’s collection of micro-fiction, itself only 120-pages long, is about the members of the close-knit community in an exurban Tokyo town. For a volume of short stories, the relationships between characters are remarkably strong. Two and three pages at a time, the reader begins to…